Can't plot because “Failed to load cairo DLL” in rstudio, but not in R

Question

I installed R 3.4 via conda, but plotting does not work in Rstudio, though does work in R, started in the terminal.

When plot(1:5) , it printed

Error in RStudioGD() : Shadow graphics device error: r error 4 (R code execution error) In addition: There were 50 or more warnings (use warnings() to see the first 50)

A similar question as https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115007464847-Can-t-plot-because-Failed-to-load-cairo-DLL-R-3-4-RStudio-Server-Open-Source-1-0-153 but the soluton does not work.

sessionInfo()

R version 3.4.1 (2017-06-30)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)

Matrix products: default
BLAS: ~/local/anaconda3/envs/mro_env/lib/R/lib/libRblas.so
LAPACK: ~/local/anaconda3/envs/mro_env/lib/R/lib/libRlapack.so

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8      LC_NUMERIC=C              LC_TIME=en_US.utf8       
 [4] LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8     LC_MONETARY=en_US.utf8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8   
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.utf8       LC_NAME=C                 LC_ADDRESS=C             

[10] LC_TELEPHONE=C            LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C      

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.4.1 magrittr_1.5   tools_3.4.1    yaml_2.1.17

Answer 1

I installed R 3.4 via conda

In short, don't do that. There are perfectly valid and current .deb binaries on every CRAN mirror, see here for more.

But mixing and matching in effectively increase the likelihood of the very issues you are seeing. I recommend against.

We also have a dedicated 'R on Debian / Ubuntu / ...' systems: r-sig-debian where this can and other questions can be discussed.